Advanced Excel Functions: Tips and Tricks for Boosting Your Productivity

Text Functions: CONCATENATE, LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, FIND, SEARCH

In this blog post, we will learn about some common text functions in Excel and how to use them. Text functions are useful for manipulating and extracting data from text strings.

CONCATENATE: This function joins two or more text strings together. For example, =CONCATENATE("Hello", " ", "World") returns "Hello World".

LEFT: This function returns a specified number of characters from the left side of a text string. For example, =LEFT("Excel", 3) returns "Exc".

RIGHT: This function returns a specified number of characters from the right side of a text string. For example, =RIGHT("Excel", 2) returns "el".

MID: This function returns a specified number of characters from the middle of a text string. For example, =MID("Excel", 2, 3) returns "xce".

LEN: This function returns the length of a text string in terms of number of characters. For example, =LEN("Excel") returns 5.

FIND: This function returns the position of a specific character or substring within a text string. It is case-sensitive and starts counting from 1. For example, =FIND("c", "Excel") returns 3.

SEARCH: This function is similar to FIND but it is not case-sensitive and it can use wildcards (* and ?) to match any character or sequence of characters. For example, =SEARCH("c*", "excel") returns 3.

Conclusion:

Text functions are powerful tools for working with text data in Excel. They can help you combine, split, extract and locate information within text strings. You can also nest them together to create more complex formulas.

FAQs:

Q: How do I use wildcards in SEARCH function?

A: You can use * to match any sequence of characters and ? to match any single character. For example, =SEARCH("?x*", "excel") returns 1.

Q: How do I compare two text strings in Excel?

A: You can use the EXACT function to check if two text strings are exactly the same (case-sensitive). For example, =EXACT("Excel", "excel") returns FALSE.

Q: How do I convert text to numbers or dates in Excel?

A: You can use the VALUE function to convert a text string that represents a number or date into a numeric value that Excel can recognize. For example, =VALUE("12/31/2020") returns 44197.